Politico: “One hundred days into the Biden administration, the White House is a tight ship defined by insularity, internal power centers and top down micromanagement – interviews with nearly two dozen people across the administration, including senior White House officials, reveal. The result is a unit that doesn’t leak (at least not that often) and that stays on script (most of the time). But it is also one where there is competition to show proximity to the boss and occasional difficulty in moving agenda items along in a timely manner. ‘Everybody feels driven to get things right and do right by Joe Biden,’ White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in an interview. ‘Some of that comes from the fact that there are a number of people here who have worked for him for decades. There’s a personal loyalty and a desire for him to be successful at a gut level, as Americans, but also as people who love him.’ Still, some aides complain Biden is kept in too much of a bubble, one where few people can get his ear outside of a cadre of loyalists he’s cultivated for decades. Exhaustion is setting in amid a punishing – and relentlessly serious – remote work regimen, with little opportunity for the levity breaks of past White Houses. Others concede that the heavy-handedness is mucking up the works.”

“By and large, however, it is working. Biden has befuddled critics and pleased progressives. He’s taken myriad actions, big and small, using executive orders, the bully pulpit and Congress. He’s done it in a way so drama-free, it couldn’t be more antithetical to his predecessor. There’s little infighting or even signs of internal disagreement. ‘They used to say ‘no drama Obama’ but honestly this White House is even more devoid of that,’ said one White House official who also worked in the Obama administration. ‘Part of Biden’s promise during the campaign was to lower the temperature and not treat the presidency like a reality show and that’s a promise he’s delivered on,’ said Ben LaBolt, a former Obama official who is also close to the Biden White House. ‘I think here you see people who are 100 percent focused on addressing a national crisis and not professional positioning. They’re focused on results.'”